opinion
Who Counts as an American, Revisited
By the narrowest possible margin, the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. Barbara preserved birthright citizenship—for now. In a concurrence with the form of King Solomon’s judgment but without its wisdom, Brett Kavanaugh split the baby of birthright citizenship in half, rejecting the majority’s finding on the Constitution along with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, but agreeing with the majority that the executive order was unlawful on statutory grounds. The vagueness of his “relevantly similar” language for future legislative denials of citizenship makes it far too easy for a hostile Congress to create a multitiered system of belonging much like countries without birthright citizenship. A future America with multiple generations born and raised here but without any say in how they are governed would be the result.
One common thread between Supreme Court rulings impacting black people and other people of color is the way their technical reasoning yields results which are indifferent to their humanity. Last week, this court ruled in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety that the plaintiff—a devout, black Rastafarian who was forcibly restrained and had his dreadlocks sheared from his head—could not sue prison officials for this egregious violation of his religious freedom. This same court which barely preserved birthright citizenship gutted judicial review of terminations of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in Mullin v. Doe, a decision which places hundreds of thousands of Haitians legally present in this country at risk of deportation along with 6000 Syrians. This is the court that Chuck Schumer jumped on social media to cheer as some great example of a check on Trump’s power. With judicial review not required, nothing prevents the Trump administration from canceling TPS (or allowing it to expired) for El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, Venezuela, and Ukraine.
The Supreme Court's earlier ruling in Louisiana v. Callais to kill Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in all but name, on top of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) and Shelby County v. Holder (2013) don’t just shift the electoral playing field further in favor of the GOP, but further toward the pre-civil rights era of American apartheid where black citizens were obliged to obey laws from governments which refused them protection and equality under them. Along with Trump’s executive branch and the GOP-controlled legislature, the federal government is trying to turn me and people like me into de facto U.S. nationals—people who cannot exercise voting rights at the federal level and cannot hold federal office—despite the law saying we are U.S. citizens.
Beyond the Supreme Court, we’ve watched Trump’s executive branch subject people of color to mass detention without trial domestically—in facilities like Camp East Montana, and the recently-closed Alligator Alcatraz (shuttered for cost, not conscience)—and abroad in places like El Salvador’s CECOT. Human Rights Watch has found that the mortality rate in ICE custody has more than doubled since January 2025. The Supreme Court enabled third country deportations with shadow docket rulings on two separate occasions in the past year. A refugee program which accepted roughly 100,000 people from all over the world in the final year of Biden’s administration has virtually collapsed. May 2026 marked the sixth consecutive month where the only refugees the United States accepted were white South Africans, admitted on the basis of a false and racist conspiracy theory about white genocide there. These are the stakes of Fall 2026 election and every election after: will the GOP be allowed to continue creating the white ethnostate they want, or will we stop them?
AI Is the Latest Pretext for Role Destruction in Tech
If you’ve worked in the tech industry for a while, you’ve seen numerous stand-alone roles disappear. The role of database administrator is one example. Quality assurance staff, whether you called them engineers or testers are another example. A previous employer of mine, having adopted agile delivery lead as a hybrid of scrum master and project manager years earlier, eliminated every employee with agile in their job title during the depths of the pandemic—1700 jobs in total. The disappearance of those roles did not mean their work disappeared. It meant the work shifted to those who remained. Developers and engineers inherited DBA and QA work. Product owners and senior engineering managers inherited the work of agile delivery leads.
In each case, the quality of the work and the level of productivity declined, while we who inherited the new work absorbed and adjusted to the broader scope. What tech companies previously did by blurring the line between development leads and development managers is now being applied to more senior engineering managers, brought by AI (at least according to James Stanier). At least in my experience, the blurring of roles and responsibilities at the next level already happened during the pandemic—prior to the launch of ChatGPT.
In the section of his piece with the heading “The evolving engineering manager role” Stanier lists the following things AI automates that “defined many engineering manager roles”: status updates, progress tracking, meeting summaries, and scheduling. This looks a lot like work I inherited after every agilist in my organization was laid off—in addition to my existing responsibilities. However, that list falls well short of defining all the work I did as a senior engineering manager for 12-18 engineers spanning 2-3 teams over the past few years. My responsibilities included quarterbacking production incident response, defining and driving application modernization, and providing technical feedback on significant architectural changes across multiple systems within our group. After the flattening that same organization executed in 2025, my scope of people management above and beyond my technical responsibilities grew from 7 engineers to 12 engineers. Combining people leadership with genuine technical depth was already the job description for engineering leaders at my level, along with fulfilling the responsibilities of people in roles which were previously eliminated. Stanier's framing treats coordination as organic engineering overhead. But in larger organizations, it was a stand-alone role—held by non-engineers—which senior engineering managers absorbed when those roles were eliminated.
Stanier again: “The coordination was never valuable in itself; it was a cost imposed by the limits of what one person could do alone. AI is removing that limit, and the data is starting to show it.” I’ve written previously about the impacts of organizational flattening that I’ve observed personally and read, but it’s worth drilling down on what Stanier oversimplifies by calling it “coordination”. That’s not the only thing happening when engineers collaborate to solve problems. They are sharing institutional knowledge. They are building tacit knowledge—the kind that exists primarily in relationships built through repeated collaborations over time. Engineers have much longer and more durable “context windows” than AI, and the software resulting from repeated collaborations over time is more likely to be better-designed and more robust than its AI-generated equivalent.
Stanier references The AI Productivity Paradox Report approvingly, but it contains findings which undermine his argument. He acknowledges its finding that high AI adoption results in 9% more bugs per engineer and PRs which are 154% larger on average. Amazon pivoting to requiring senior engineer sign-off on AI-assisted changes has likely caused review bottlenecks as AI generates large PRs faster than humans can review them. A Barcelona-based engineering leader for a large online wedding planning company I’ve spoken with regarding Stanier’s article has observed this phenomenon with a recent project his team led.
Even those boosting AI adoption acknowledge that it drives both significant code bloat, and the same report "observed no significant correlation between AI adoption and improvements at the company level”. By suggesting that senior engineering managers cede coordination and reporting responsibilities to AI and leverage it to generate code, Stanier is advocating compounding AI-associated risk and putting responsibility on the senior engineering manager to effectively mitigate both. As strategic decision-makers, senior engineering managers should be mitigating risk—not compounding it.
Who Counts as an American?
I listened to the oral argument on birthright citizenship & so many people on bluesky were just straight-up wrong.
E.g. people were saying that the mere Q of whether Native Americans are citizens due to birthright citizenship is racist… But Wang (arguing for the ACLU) says it is not birthright.
[image or embed]— Kate Sills (
[@katelynsills.com](http://katelynsills.com)
)
Even if the specific question isn’t racist, the project which led to yesterday’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court definitely is. My parents were not citizens when they had my sister and I in the 1970s. The 14th Amendment is why we have birthright citizenship. Dishonest arguments and political rhetoric are how “who is a citizen?” became subject to the whim of popular opinion rather than the 14th Amendment and 150 years of jurisprudence. Any and all arguments that the definition of birthright citizenship should be smaller than that definition are being advanced by people who want to return to either the pre-civil rights era caste system of this country’s history—or the pre-Civil War era one which drew the circle of citizenship around landowning white men and no one else. The rancid fruit of birtherism from the start of the Trump era fell from a tree with deep roots.
GORSUCH: Do you think Native Americans are birthright citizens under your test?
SAUER: Ah, I think … so. I have to think that through.
[image or embed]— Aaron Rupar (
[@atrupar.com](http://atrupar.com)
)
Gorsuch's question of whether or not Native Americans are birthright citizens was an obvious and predictable one. Sauer’s lack of preparedness to answer that question should be embarassing, if not a firing offense. But it lays plain the objective of Trump’s regime—to reinstate the caste system which existed in this country prior to the success of the civil rights movement. The question of whether or not invaded people want the citizenship of the invader—applicable to every Native American tribe as it is—also applies to the Hawaiian, the Virgin Islander, the Puerto Rican, the Samoan, and the people of Guam. I’m not a Spanish speaker, but the phrase “Hawaii no, no” during Ricky Martin’s segment of Bad Bunny’s halftime show seemed (to me) to refer to how Hawai’i became part of the United States and a possibly a wish for Puerto Rico not to be treated the same way (I learned later my guess was correct). Reading The Great Oklahoma Swindle and trying to fit it into the context of the broader history of the country, one conclusion I’ve drawn is that the treatment of Native Americans by the federal government was a key part of the template for how they would later treat people in the territories they conquered outside the United States.
What passes as history instruction to children in the United States has many gaps. Unlike the absence of teaching about the Great Migration (my experience of high school American history), we got a bit about the Spanish-American War involving “Remember the Maine" and a little bit about yellow journalism. What we didn’t get was the larger context of how much fighting the United States did with the kingdom of Spain, how many lands became U.S. territories as a result—and how citizenship became conditional or required legislation to become automatic. The rights and privileges the people in these territories have by virtue of their relationship to the United States vary significantly (just like that of Native American tribes). The Jones Act is one example of a law which interferes with the ability of Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska to directly import what they need—a significant and continuing problem for Puerto Rico’s full recovery from Hurricane Maria as visually-depicted in a different part of Bad Bunny’s halftime show. Another thing I learned from one of my Crucian (person from St. Croix, USVI) friends, is that you can be a U.S. national, but not a U.S. citizen. For some time after the U.S. bought what we now call the U.S. Virgin Islands from the Dutch, the people on the island were U.S. nationals. It took legislation to make them birthright citizens, just as it did for Native Americans. It may still be the case that people born in American Samoa are U.S. nationals, who can choose to become naturalized citizens once they become adults. The difference in rights and responsibilities between U.S. nationals and U.S. citizens still seems caste-like to me.
In any case, the heart of the matter is this: the executive branch is asserting the right to decide by decree who counts as an American and who does not. The objective of Trump’s regime is to do to non-white Americans within the bounds of the United States what has already been done to people in territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands—take away their political power and remove the duty of the state to treat them equally. The same Supreme Court who reportedly expressed skepticism of the government’s position during oral arguments has already acceded to Trump’s demands along these lines on numerous occasions. Not only did they grant cert to these specious arguments in the first place, they ruled 6-3 that lower courts couldn’t use injunctions to block nationwide enforcement of Trump’s birthright citizenship decree less than a year ago. What many of us now call “Kavanaugh stops” was the Supreme Court legalizing racial profiling by Immigration & Customs Enforcement, an obvious and egregious violation of both the 4th Amendment and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
So even if the Supreme Court rules against the executive branch as they should, they deserve no praise at all. Their prior rulings enabled an inciter of insurrection to appear on the ballot again in the first place. Their shadow docket rulings continue to enable Trump to sow chaos in the country and abroad. John Roberts (and William Rehnquist before him if we’re being fully honest) led the Supreme Court to legitimize numerous arguments which have resulted in non-white people being treated as "less than”. They’ve turned the court away from undoing the harms of the past to enabling old harms in the modern day—just as Chief Justice Roger Taney did in his day. The damage they have done still remains, even if birthright citizenship is spared for now. The long-term project of shrinking the circle of citizenship is very much still in progress. We should keep that in mind, even as we acknowledge the specific ways in which a question of citizenship might not be racist.
Silicon Valley's Latest Crisis of Conscience Doesn't Impress Me
Anil Dash recently shared this N.Y. Times piece about the negative reaction within Silicon Valley to a number of CEOs attending the screening of an Amazon-produced documentary about Melania Trump. Dash has been consistent for many years in encouraging people in tech to vocally oppose things that are wrong and uses this story for the same purpose. The piece links to an open letter calling for ICE to leave our cities. But I’m unimpressed by this latest crisis of conscience in tech because of their lack of introspection regarding how their treatment of women and underrepresented minorities over many years contributed to our current environment.
I fully understand the shock and anger over our government’s murder of Alex Pretti. But I can’t help but contrast that to the lack of reaction to Andreesen Horowitz hiring Daniel Penny as a deal partner, soon after his acquittal for strangling Jordan Neely to death on the NYC subway. Venture capital as an industry has funded startups with black founders at a rate of just 0.4%. The same Jeff Dean quoted in the N.Y. Times piece saying “Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this,” also fired Timnit Gebru under questionable circumstances in 2020. Google would go on to fire Margaret Mitchell, co-founder of their AI ethics unit early in 2021. Both Meta and Amazon embarked very quickly on a full-scale retreat from their DEI initiatives in the wake of Trump’s re-election in 2024. In this respect, they followed the lead of Elon Musk, the founders of Basecamp, and the CEO of Coinbase in becoming “anti-woke”.
The tech industry consistently fails to see the connection between how the way they devalue their employees enables the ways Trump’s regime devalues everyone. We are living through every warning about AI that the women researchers followed and interviewed in the documentary Coded Bias gave us 6 years ago. This morning’s news brings word that Amazon is cutting another 16,000 jobs, supposedly because of AI improvements. Meanwhile, some of the most prominent usages of GenAI include generating CSAM and the Trump administration altering photos in support of their mass deportation agenda. The data center that powers Grok has been poisoning the air in a predominantly black community in Memphis for some time now. GenAI as an industry is built on industrial-scale theft of copyrighted works—unfortunately aided and abetted by at least one federal court ruling so far. Without exception, the CEO of Anthropic argues against regulation of GenAI even as he warns of it stealing jobs, all while raising billions of dollars.
Criticism of an out-of-control and unaccountable federal government is good and necessary as far as it goes. But absent the industry doing some serious introspection and taking action to undo the broader harms to people they are enabling and actively engaged in, it looks like virtue signaling on the way back to business as usual.
The thin line between entertainment and war
There may not be a more apt lyric to describe our present moment than that repeated line from No Shelter, a single from the otherwise forgettable soundtrack of the Godzilla movie from nearly 30 years ago. We’re a couple days into the aftermath of Donald Trump ordering the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro (and his wife), to stand trial in New York for violating U.S. law. Our president–who was elected and re-elected in large part because he played a successful businessman on reality TV–didn’t just order and monitor this raid from his tacky and unsecure club in Florida, he made sure pictures of him looking serious were sprayed all over social media.
In the lead-up to the blatantly-illegal kidnapping of a foreign head of state, the might of the US military has been given the task of blowing up defenseless speedboats and killing their occupants in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific on the suspicion (which has yet to be proven) that they are carrying illegal drugs. The Trump administration shared drone footage of at least one such boat being destroyed by a missile.
Whether it’s Trump, or Pete Hegseth, or Stephen Miller, or anyone else in his administration, it really seems that they engage in war and cruelty for entertainment. Social media accounts run by government officials regularly post either insulting AI slop, or ads that clearly reference fascist and white supremacist imagery from the past. Today brought news that someone used non-public information to bet on Polymarket that Maduro would be captured and netted over $400K on a wager of a little over $32K.
Even worse, it’s entirely possible that Maduro’s kidnapping is just the start of this latest escalation of Trump’s lawlessness. Cuba, Colombia, even Mexico could be next. It seems the only lyric of No Shelter that didn’t age well after all this time was “Trade in ya history for a VCR”.
You Don’t Need the Manosphere, You Need Hobbies
Maria Bustillos wrote this great piece on the inadequacy of Scott Galloway’s kinder, gentler approach to the manosphere using Jessica Winter’s review of his latest book as a launching pad. The arrival of this piece couldn’t have been more perfectly timed, given the laughter we’re still enjoying over how wounded Elon Musk was by a Joyce Carol Oates tweet that called him uneducated and uncultured. Bustillos' piece prompted this insight for me regarding the manosphere (which I initially shared on Bluesky):
A large part of what is broken about the so-called manosphere, whether for the scammers, the marks, or the well-meaning (like Galloway) is that their conception of manhood is as a performance—for other men.
A manhood which is primarily about what other men think of you cannot help but be shallow and unstable—constantly under threat. The last time I wrote about manhood in response to Ian Dunt's “progressive” attempt to do so, the fictional example I used highlighted the problem with male expectations of what masculinity should look like. This fundamental flaw of the manosphere cannot be fixed by Galloway’s 3 Ps of manhood: (Men) Protect, Provide, and Procreate. Even though the 3 Ps are ostensibly about men’s proper relationship to women, they skip over the fundamental requirement for a man to have a clear sense of self. Winter’s piece digs deeper into these misguided attempts to “reform” the manosphere by Governor Gavin Newsom and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. Their presidential aspirations make them uniquely unsuited to this task, not only because it’s obvious their care doesn’t extend beyond what might get them elected, but because they’ve “accepted at face value [Charlie] Kirk’s premise—young American men are in terrible and unprecedented straits, and those currents are yanking them rightward” as Winter says. They believe (cynically, in my opinion) that if they pull just the right levers in government that they can fix what’s wrong with young American men. Unspoken in the Kirk premise is that the young American men being discussed are white. Also unacknowledged in this premise is the sense of entitlement and grievance behind it. The manosphere tells these men that they are owed something—despite not having put in any work for that something at all. Kirk in particular told them that women and people of color have things they shouldn’t and don’t deserve. Men with inner lives hollow enough to be swayed by racist messaging like that won’t be convinced to vote for you with “new zoning regulations and tax credits for first-time homeowners”, Emanuel’s offering to young men according to Winter’s piece.
One of many things Bustillos’ piece does well is highlight the wide variety of manhood ideals in fiction and contrasts them with how flat Galloway’s concept of masculinity is by comparison. One example she names who’s worth expanding on further is Captain James T. Kirk. The womanizer in space aspect of the character is stereotypical, even offensive to our modern sensibilities. But the friendship between Kirk and Spock actually provides a powerful example of the type of relationship we underrate the importance of cultivating—deep friendships with other men. If you read the Bible (either academically or as a believer), you’ve encountered a similar relationship between Jonathan—the son of King Saul—and David. There is plenty of debate regarding whether or not their relationship was sexual, but I fall in the camp of those who believe the friendship was deep and platonic. Another manhood ideal in fiction who wasn’t in Bustillos’ list is Captain Jack Aubrey, as depicted by Russell Crowe in the movie Master and Commander. He isn’t defined solely by his skill as a sailor and captain who inspires fierce loyalty in his crew. He also plays the violin. His friendship with Dr. Stephen Maturin includes a mutual love of music and we see and hear them play violin and cello duets. Benjamin Sisko—my favorite captain in my favorite genre—maintains numerous hobbies including the piano, baseball, and cooking (notable because of the availability of replicators).
As a society, we’ve put ourselves in a place where our discussions of masculinity revolve around romantic relationships with women and competency at “manly” things. We don’t talk seriously about deep friendships with other men and we don’t talk about the importance of hobbies. By hobby I don’t mean a side hustle or something you monetize. I mean a thing you enjoy and pursue just because you like it. I think “manosphere men” are there in large part because they lack other interests. They don’t read books, watch movies or plays, go to art museums, concerts, or sporting events. My parents took my sister and I to all of those things on a regular basis.
Over the years I’ve picked up and dropped any number of hobbies, thanks in large part to a close friend who has a wide variety of interests. We’ve sailed boats together, cycled, and gone downhill skiing. We got into German boardgames because of a couple of his roommates. He taught me film photography. Marriage and twins (and age) meant less time (and energy) for certain hobbies. I haven’t touched the piano seriously in years (which I regret). Nor have I been on the bike like I used to be. But I do play videogames with my daughter more and more regularly. I read books (dead tree, audiobooks, and ebooks). I listen to music. I write (occasionally the old-fashioned way, in a notebook with a pen instead of online). When I go on vacation, I take photos.
The main point of many of these hobbies was just spending time with friends doing something fun. Some of them built useful skills. Some of them turned out to be great ways to spend time with women I wanted relationships with. The solitary ones (especially reading & writing) help me maintain my inner life—my beliefs, what I think, how I feel, what (and whom) I value--my sense of self. What the manosphere offers men (even Galloway’s slightly more benevolent version) are shortcuts to companionship and a narrative that makes society accountable for the work of understanding and growing themselves that they’ve failed to do. There’s more to being a man than cleaning your room, or competence at work, or being fit. You need to build and maintain an inner life, and an outer life (including hobbies)! Spend less time being concerned with people who don’t care about you beyond your vote for them, or the money in your wallet they want. Spend more time with people who matter to you—and whom you matter to—regardless of where you work or how much you make.
How to Be Black
I finished reading this provocatively-titled book a couple of days ago. I expected Baratunde Thurston’s memoir to have its funny moments (he worked for The Onion until recently) and it did. I was not expecting the deep insights about black identity I found throughout the book. I also wasn’t expecting to see as much of myself in the author (beyond the unpleasant childhood experiences I had as a result of not fitting the stereotypes of what black kids are supposed to do and be). It was a pleasant surprise to discover that Thurston and I have Washington Post internships in common (as does my friend Sandro, one of the handful of other black computer scientists I know).
I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that Thurston’s interest in technology was inspired (at least in part) by his mother, who made a living writing COBOL for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. One of the other technologists that blogs whom I admire greatly, raganwald, was inspired into his career by his mother as well.
If you enjoy stories about people destroying stereotypes in general (or stereotypes of black people in particular), How to Be Black is well worth reading.